kiwords

We went swimming tonight, at the rec center. It was the boys, Dad and me – Mom was stuck at work late. Going to the pool has become a Tuesday night tradition, and it would be easier to convince the children they should sleep on the back porch than that they should miss swimming night. So there we were.

Last week Max became a swimmer. He gathered all the parts he’s learned about swimming, the “big arms” circles, the kicking, holding his breath, and together with impetus in the form of Mom offering him $5 if he swam across the pool, assembled the parts into a whole act of swimming. It was like magic, seeing him move away from the pool wall, arms thrashing, chin jutting out above the water. He’s amazing.
Tonight he experimented with his newfound freedom in the water. He leaped into the water from the side of the pool; he swam from side to side, then diagonally. And he churned and churned and churned, his face glowing with the knowledge that he’s a swimmer.

He’s asleep now. If I had worked as hard as he did today, I would require at least seventeen hours of sleep. I’m sure he’ll be up at the crack of dawn, though.

Tre is a smugly competent swimmer. He goes down the water slide, casually crosses the deep end, and likes to sneak up behind people underwater. More than once I’ve felt his hand close on my ankle and treated the people around me to a leap-and-squawk routine that really never gets old. He always wears goggles in the pool, because the chlorine bothers his eyes so much. Tonight I glanced at him and noticed that his goggles were entirely fogged up.

“Hey, can you see anything with those goggles on?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” he assured me, then turned to gaze around the pool, “I can. Mostly I see fog, though.”

Oh. Ok then.

Raphi likes to leap into someone’s arms from the side of the pool. He shrieks, “I believe I can FLYYYY!” and hauls off and JUMPS into the water. Once, as he sailed into my arms, his toes caught the front of my swimsuit, yanking it down to about belly button-level. I wrestled to grip him in one hand while I snatched my suit back up to an above-nipple height. I told myself that with all the splashing and flailing three year old around me, no one noticed anything. A man standing near me, catching his own son as he jumped off the pool’s edge, smirked. “Nice catch,” he said.

So a good time was had by EVERYONE.